Should She Choose Her Father S Legacy Or Listen To Her Heart? Zarri Bano Is The Glamorous Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Daughter Of A Wealthy Muslim Landowner, Habib Khan. She Falls In Love With Sikander, A Business Tycoon And Plans To Marry Him, But Her Father Takes An Instant, Irrational Dislike To Sikander And Vetoes The Match. When His Only Son Is Killed In A Freak Riding Accident, Habib Khan Decides To Make Zarri Bano His Heiress, Resurrecting An Ancient Tradition Which Decrees That An Heiress Must Remain Celibate. Zarri Bano Is Thus Forced Into Marriage To The Holy Koran And Becomes Her Clan S Holy Woman . But Will Zarri Bano S Heart Allow Her To Ignore Her Love For Sikander? And Can Sikander Live Without Her? Set In Contemporary Pakistan, London And Egypt, Fated To Love Is A Romantic Story Of Love And Betrayal, With All The Pressures And Conflicts That Modern Life And Old Traditions Bring. A Lean, Lyrical Meditation On Tradition And Independence, Sensuality And Sacrifice The Times A Very Moving Tale Of Love, Passion And Islamic Traditions . . .Difficult To Put Down Bbc National Asian Network A Dramatic Story Of Family Intrigue, Religious Passions And Riproaring Romance Michèle Roberts

What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."